Psychical Research

Some of these pieces, such as “Are we Automata?” “The Laws of Habit,” and “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology”—the essay that presented the notion of the “stream of thought”--show James working out ideas for The Principles. Other articles, such as “The Knowing of Things Together,” regarding the unity of consciousness, and “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” which introduces James’s definition of pragmatism, reveal his transition to the philosophical issues that would dominate the last two decades of his life: faith, truth, morality, and the tensions between idealism and empiricism, monism and pluralism.

As a public philosopher, James spoke out on political and social issues ranging from restrictions on the licensing of physicians to Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy. War, for any reason, seemed to James deplorable, but not inevitable if there were a “moral equivalent” to harness men’s aggressive instincts for constructive ends.

James published his most famous works late in his career: The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1906), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), and The Meaning of Truth (1909). Although he was an elegant and compelling writer, he often inspired confusion among his professional colleagues. The concepts of pragmatism and radical empiricism, especially, daunted many readers, and James confided to his close friends Charles Strong and Ferdinand Canning Schiller that he felt misunderstood. In a tattered manila envelope, he carried the manuscript for a final work that he hoped would clarify his ideas, once and for all. Some Problems of Philosophy (2) (3) was published posthumously in 1911, completed by his student Horace Kallen.